Inglewood girls basketball coach Tony Scott is coming off a season in which he guided his team to an improbable run to the CIF Southern Section Division III-A final.

But now Scott finds himself embroiled in a battle with Inglewood High School administrators over what he alleges was a misappropriation of funds his team raised throughout the season.

“I’m tired of it — it happens almost every year, and this year was the worst,” Scott said. “I could understand if it was money the school gave us, but this is money the girls worked for.”

Scott says he went to the Inglewood High administration on April 7 — three weeks after the season ended — to get money for the team’s end-of-the-year banquet. Instead, he said, then-Vice Principal Jose Gallegos said his team had a negative balance of $8,000.

Scott said there should have been more than $5,000 in the account.

“We fundraise to keep money in our account so they can’t tell us what to do, but the administration used all the money in the account,” he said.

The dust-up offers a window into a district that has seen a student exodus and what one official has called a deeply ingrained culture of corruption.

In 2012, Inglewood Unified became the ninth school district in California history to be taken over by the state for insolvency. The state floated the district an emergency loan of $55 million. As a consequence, the superintendent and elected school board were replaced by Don Brann, a lone decision-maker handpicked by state superintendent of public instruction.

Brann’s charge is to eradicate a structural deficit of $16 million, repay the loan and put controls in place to ensure the fiscal health of the district.

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For the girls basketball team’s missing funds, Scott said he finally got a face-to-face meeting with Gallegos and then-Principal Kevin Brown on June 12.

Gallegos gave Scott an itemized list of expenses that included a boys basketball tournament, nonleague girls basketball game officials, girls basketball scorekeepers and girls basketball announcers — all of which Scott said his team never has had to pay for during his 10-year tenure.

He said that although Brown ordered Gallegos to take the charges off the account, the directive was ignored.

“He took out money from our account — without my authorization — and applied it to things that our program has never paid for in the past,” Scott said.

Gallegos, now the interim principal, said in a statement from the Inglewood Unified School District, “IUSD takes any allegation of mishandling of funds very seriously. The item is currently under investigation.”

Brown could not be reached for comment.

Brann said Inglewood Unified is in the discovery phase of looking into the matter.

“This guy’s a walk-on coach, the principal left to Beverly Hills,” he said. “I think in the void of the principal leaving and this guy claiming there is money missing, the vice principal, Jose Gallegos, was asked to look into it to find out, ‘Is there money missing, or is it just in another account?’ ”

Brann noted that it isn’t uncommon for districts to get dinged in audits for inadequate controls around student body activities, saying the matter can be “much bigger than just a walk-on coach’s little problem. A bigger problem of managing money fairly and having good records.”

“I wanted to give our team a chance to celebrate our season. We might have lost in the championship, but we were still in the championship,” he said. “After all the kids’ hard work, they have nothing to show for it. And now they’re all gone.”

Scott says he’s at his limit.

“It’s not worth it. Every year, they take our money, and we have to start over,” he added. “I’m tired of it. I’m done. I’d rather walk out than have to do all this again for another year. I just want answers.”